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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Maximus VII Gene installation experience

In the previous post I mentioned that I got my new board and also about some issues I had while installing it. But I didn’t post any pics, so here are some photos of the entire thing.

Food! The little guy joined the party.

In the box.

Just moved the CPU from the Maximus VI Hero. Haven't cleaned the old paste yet.

Cleaned the paste

Screwed in the audio daughter board

I/O back panel. Couple of the USB 3.0 ports are provided by ASMedia.

Installing the cage for the CPU cooler. Forgot to take a pic of after applying thermal paste. Spread it using a credit card instead of using a pea sized bit in the middle. Dropped temps by 2C.

Audio daughter board fits under the CPU cooler just fine.

No problems with RAM clearance but that’s a feature of the CPU cooler, not the motherboard.

Oh oh this wasn't supposed to happen. I bought this cooler because it cleared the first PCI-E slot of most boards like a champ. Apparently the Gene has a bad socket placement.

But didn't stop me from installing cooler or the graphics card. The fan clip touches the back of the GPU so had to use some insulation tape.

Phew!

This is how I connected the front audio cable. But there is a better way to do it. There is a header on the board that connects to the audio card internally, and I found out about it at the end so I left it as it is.